Brad: Hi Kaloyan, can you explain your project in one sentence for people who aren’t familiar with it?

Kaloyan: Sure, we’re introducing Che into the Zend Training process by providing students with a ready-to-play-with PHP development environment.

What challenges, technical or otherwise, did you face in building your project? Was Eclipse Che able to help you overcome them?

When going for a week of on-site training, Zend trainers usually spend the first day helping students set up the necessary development environment on their PCs or laptops. This is a lot of time that could otherwise be spent in actual training. While setting up the development environment is an important aspect of software programming, it is not the best first lesson to be taken. If I can make an analogy, when you go for your first piano lesson, you don’t start with assembling or tuning the piano. You start with something much simpler, like playing the C Major scale.

Eclipse Che gives Zend trainers the freedom to choose the first lesson that best fits their audience. Trainers are equipped with a mini PC that hosts Che with an individual workspace for each student. Each workspace is prepared with all tools necessary for the training and opens in the student’s browser with a simple click of a hyperlink. The learning process is ready to start from the very first minute — just like the C Major scale!

That’s a great analogy! I played the piano for several years but I definitely would have quit at the start if I’d had to assemble it!

Of course as a Che contributor you’ve got to get into the details and do some of that assembly, so what part of that is most exciting?

When you work with Eclipse Che you see that there’s a lot of thought that has gone into it on conceptual level. It revolutionizes the IDE by learning from the decades of past experience with the traditional desktop IDE. It is exciting to explore the new opportunities that Che opens for building next-generation IDE solutions.

Debugging PHP in Eclipse Che

That’s a credit to the Eclipse Che committers — it’s a great group. So where do you plan on taking Che?

My team provides development tools for PHP developers. So our first contribution goal for Che is to implement complete support for the PHP programming language. This will open opportunities for Che to be used in a number of scenarios where PHP is involved.

There’s a lot of interest from people in adding language capabilities (intellisense, auto-complete, etc…) to Eclipse Che. By supporting the Language Server Protocol we’ve made it a lot easier for people to do that so it’s great to see you taking advantage of that.

Finally, since we’re all tool geeks at heart I’d be interested to know what other open source tools you use.

I use the Eclipse IDE, Fedora Linux, Gimp, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

Thanks Kaloyan for speaking with me today and thanks for contributing to Che, I think people are going to be very excited about your added support for PHP and what you’ll be showing at CheConf2016.